Will be holding off on Diablo 3 for a bit, filming this week and can't really afford it right now anyway. Played the beta for an hour or two when they had the open beta weekend, and I'm definitely looking forward to it.

The last few weeks, I played a LOT of Tropico 4. Such a fun game! I love how you CAN focus on different things. You don't HAVE to have tourism, industry AND farming.

Honestly, I don't see anyone using that option. Why pay real money when you can pay in-game pretend money or just play enough to get the damn thing yourself?F'real, paying for digital items has always seemed lame to me. Sure I'll pay for digital content, like a game on steam or on iOS, but like hell am I going to make in app purchases for more gold or whatever.

pay to win is the cancer that is killing videogames - this can be seen most in the new SSX, where most gear is so outrageously priced but they give you the nice little "BUY MAOR CREDITZZZ" button. Pissed me off so much I took the game back the next day, no joke.

agentarsenic- I didn't have an problem with SSX's implementation, honestly. I thought the gear screen did a fairly decent job between offering gear that's slightly better than what you've got, and affordable after a race or two, and showing the high-end goodies available once you've really got some cash under you. Most games of this sort have a tendency of having money be just a constantly-rising number with no real use later in the game, so getting impatient and spending real-world money on fake-world money is only worth it for players who don't actually want to play the thing they've bought. I enjoy the slow progression (with occasional fast progressions when I've been careful saving) so the BREAK THIS GAME! button held no temptation for me.

I'm also playing, on my girlfriend's iPad, way too much Jetpack Joyride. Every goodie I've bought in-game has been from earned credits. If a game is worth playing, I'll be on it more than long enough to earn every in-game item I care about (assuming proper in-game economy, of course). If a game isn't worth the time, then spending more money isn't going to help the situation.

@JamesWhile I certainly enjoy the progression that the game has to offer without the auction house, if a game offers me a way to break it, I always have to do it. I just feel downtrodden if I don't exploit the mechanics to their maximum potential, in anything I play. Of course, the game isn't really going to get difficult until at least hell regardless of what I do, and even then death has no consequence, so it's all a bit whatever. We'll see how playing hardcore goes once I'm properly familiar with the game.

I've broken games by exploiting things to their fullest before, like Saints Row 3. Infinite Ammo was, in retrospect, a mistake. Just because a system exists in the game to make it no fun at all doesn't mean I should use it, although in the case of SR3 I didn't realize at the time how much less fun it made the game. I don't mind powering up, but if there's a God button it should be able to be turned off.

There's quite a difference between things like God mode and infinite ammo and simply playing the game within the system it gives you. There's a reason Saints Row 3 didn't allow you to get those bonuses until the end of the game.

There's quite a difference between things like God mode and infinite ammo and simply playing the game within the system it gives you.

The problem with SR3 is that infinite ammo with zero reload time was the system it gave you, and effectively god mode. Plus I'm the kind of gamer who explores every square inch and gets into trouble for the fun of it, so I had those abilities 2/3 (3/4?) of the way through. No cheat codes involved, it was just the system by which you upgraded your character. Basically, it was a bad choice and I wish I hadn't made it. That it came in the latter half of the game rather than the beginning is the only difference between SR3's upgrade system and Diablo III's auction house.

So, Max Payne 3. If you didn't get on with Max Payne 2 you probably won't get on with this. It's basically the same game with a modern lick of paint.

But what a fine lick of paint that is. The game is so... grungy. Now I don't know anything really about Sao Paolo, but this game really wants to make a statement about the difference between the haves and the have-nots. Just onto the start of the second disc where Max goes wandering into the favelas, and they nail the 'noone wants to see you down here American' thing so well. Max is a nutcase with serious firearms skills, but you can tell just how damned uncomfortable he feels walking around the place.

The cutscenes and cinemas don't use the 'comic book panel' thing from the first two games, instead they're done with lots of shaky cam, blurring, and typography; certain words spoken in the dialogue appear on screen, it's more interesting than I make it sound. This is the opening scene of the game, should give you a better idea of what I'm trying and failing to explain.

There are some simple continuity nods, and the silly tv shows are still there (there's a glorious parody of the kind of OTT soaps that come out of South America). I also suspect that if you can speak Brazillian Portugese then there'll be all sorts of additional fun as most characters don't speak English and it's not subbed (because Max doesn't speak the language either).

Liking it a lot to be honest. Good example of taking an old game and giving it a modern treatment without feeling the need to completely change how any of it worked.

As with the other Layton games so far, most of the puzzles are pretty darn good, and there's a bunch where there are perfectly valid interpretations of the puzzle that the game just doesn't accept. "Oh, you didn't come up with OUR solution? Nope, sorry, you get less points now."

Something that I was thinking about while reading your blog post, Vorn, is whether or not people get hung up on whether or not something is a game because we call them games. I wonder if that's really the best name for this medium.

That said, I think games are going to be stuck with 'games' the same way sequential art is stuck with 'comics,' at least in the English-speaking world. Not inherently a bad thing, but it makes you wonder: what else would we call video games, if we didn't call them video games?

Academics used to like to divide them into 'games' and 'interactive fiction', with proponents of the two camps known as 'ludologists' and 'narratologists'. The argument from ludologists was that games should only be analysed purely in terms of how they played, whereas narratologists believed that games were a new form of storytelling and that the actual game part wasn't worth study (I'm simplyfying, and no doubt misrepresenting, the two positions quite a lot here...)

These days most academics know it's far more complicated than that, so I don't think we're really very far into choosing the language to talk about videogaming at that level yet, let alone into some actual study.

For better or worse the term 'videogame' seems to have stuck for the time being, and as names tend to long overstay their welcome I can't see that changing. As I grew up here in the UK they were 'electronic games', then 'computer games' before we adopted the US form 'videogames'.

One term that seems to fit Dear Esther (albeit still awkwardly) is Play Novel or Visual Novel. It's been a Japanese format/genre for a while now, and the only major release I can think of hereabouts has been the Phoenix Wright franchise.